Consider the generic version of a transaction every propane dealer has run a thousand times. No names here, no single company — just the shape of the business.
Thursday in November, a little after nine. A customer walks out to the tank with a flashlight, reads the gauge, doesn't like the number, and goes back inside to call. The office closed at five. She gets the after-hours greeting, which routes true emergencies to a pager and everything else to a callback queue. She leaves her name, spells her street twice, and guesses at her account number.
Friday morning a CSR plays the message, searches the name, finds two of them, picks the right one, and calls back. Voicemail. The customer calls the office herself at two in the afternoon from her car. They reconfirm the address. The CSR asks how she'd like to pay, and the customer reads sixteen digits out loud in a parking lot. The fill goes on next week's route.
Nothing in that sequence is broken. It simply took two employees, three phone calls and roughly seventeen hours to process an order the customer had fully decided on the night before, standing in her own driveway.
Originally published on Propane Insider.